


We Could Make a Family

by orphan_account



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: Domestic, Gen, Parenthood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-30
Updated: 2014-05-01
Packaged: 2018-01-17 14:56:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1391869
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Though there was no relation, and they'd never met, Sunny reminded Hal of his sister.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. You Remind Me of Someone

**Author's Note:**

> based off of one of [this neat person's](http://ota-con.tumblr.com/post/81152514624/my-otacon-headcanon-list-c-below-a-cut-because) headcanons!

“Hal, _please_ pick me up!”

Sunny grabbed Hal's fingers in her small, gentle hands, tugging urgently. She stood on his shoes, a striped, oversized sweater crawling up her arms as she pulled softly.

Her request came nearly half a decade after Emma's death, but the words could've come from either mouth and Hal wouldn't have known the difference.

He saved the nostalgia for a moment and wrapped his hands around Sunny's little wrists, carefully pulling upwards to let her perch heavily on his hip. She pushed away from him, mesmerized by the sight of a long, clean beach over a small wooden fence. Clenching one hand in Hal's coat, she let him support her as she took in the view. 

Hal felt a familiar warm feeling in his chest, watching his adopted niece-daughter. Snake had made the grave mistake of mentioning how he once partied on the beach they were flying over, and how nice it was. Sunny, who had been lying in wait for such a moment, immediately begged them to land so she could see a real beach. 

She even pulled out her “get out of jail free” card, reminding them both very innocently that they did, in fact, promise her a vacation of sorts. Snake had quickly busied himself in cleaning his gear, leaving Otacon gaping and without any backup to deny the child. Cornered, Hal reluctantly agreed.

They'd docked at a small, local airport under the identification of some high-class businessmen, easy enough since they'd dropped off the radar after the fall of GW. Snake still had his reservations, but when Hal coyly said, “Well, why don't _you_ tell her we can't?” the situation quickly cleared up.

Currently, the mercenary was “guarding” the rental car, to which Sunny only complained about slightly. Hal told her to let him be, and that beaches weren't for everyone, knowing David was having issues with his back. His condition was worsening visibly each day, though David was putting up quite the fight. 

“Wow, look at those birds! Those must be Pacific Gulls, I read about them before we landed! They can get _so_ big!”

“Really? They don't look so big from here,” Hal replied, smiling at her enthusiasm.

_”Those horses are so big, Hal, look at them!”_

Hal closed his eyes, reveling in the salty breeze. 

_A parade: some ten, one hundred, a thousand years prior._

_”Hal, lift me up higher! I can't see!”_

Sunny leaned further, putting a hand on the little fence.

“Can we get closer?” she asked. “I want to see them better.”

The engineer blinked his eyes open, and turned his head to glance at Snake. He looked asleep, laying back in the car seat. Unsurprised, Hal turned back to the small child in his arms. 

“Why not?”

Sunny gasped excitedly, squirming out of his arms to bolt to the small gate a few feet away. She tugged on the rope which served for a handle, and Hal watched her stagger through the sand, chuckling slightly at her recently-discovered confidence. She was shy, he knew, but she was still a child, with an abundance of excitement bottled up 30,000 feet above the ground. 

Hal could understand that living in an aircraft with two middle-aged men, one of whom had zero experience with children, could be difficult and boring for a young girl. Snake's idea of bonding usually involved teaching Sunny about some pistol, or even demonstrating CQC. Sunny loved Snake, but not even she could sit diligently through his boring lectures about self-defense.

He could only hope Snake was around long enough to help him help Sunny through puberty, though Snake did make a compelling argument on another option: Mei Ling.

They all had mixed feelings about how Sunny would spend her childhood, and whether or not they should dock their aircraft permanently. Mei Ling, the one Hal turned to for all advice concerning Sunny, demanded that they find a house and enroll Sunny in private school. That way, she'd grow up at least a little bit normal. David and Hal couldn't deny it would be good for her, but each struggled with a hefty dose of doubt and protectiveness, and their own ability to keep her safe and happy.

The helpless feeling of losing Emma still plagued him, and each time Sunny mirrored a memory of her, the fear of losing the child resurfaced. Though there was no relation, and they'd never met, Sunny was uncannily alike the deceased hacker, and Otacon constantly found similarities in the girl's actions. 

The shared behaviors went beyond their astounding gifts in coding. Sunny, despite her ability to read at a college level, loved having children's books read to her. Hal had more than once stood in the doorway to Sunny's tucked-away room, watching as Snake read her _Charlotte's Web_ for the sixth time. 

Hal still had the old, torn-up copy of _The Giving Tree_ that Emma asked him to read to her countless times, buried in a box somewhere. 

When Sunny picked the mushrooms off her pizza, complaining about how slimy and icky they were, Hal could swear he was sitting next to Emma again, happily taking them from her.

Hal realized once, while brushing Sunny's hair, that he probably only forged the connections due to the similar role he played in each relationship. Still, it felt eerily similar.

Sunny yelled, snapping Otacon out of his memory. His heart raced in the moment before he located her, some stretch away on the otherwise empty beach, holding up a piece of abalone. 

“Hal! Look what I fooound,” she bellowed, face red, sand already covering her shorts and shirt. She tucked the shell in her pocket and continued rummaging around in the sand as Hal made his way closer to her. Pulling his coat shut against the slight chill, Hal smiled.

Hal thought that, had she lived through the Big Shell, Emma and Sunny would've been good friends.


	2. Raising the Sun

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sunny was slowly but surely getting older, and prettier, and more capable and more smart than either Snake or Otacon knew how to deal with.

34B. 40C, 42D. 

_What?_

36D, 32A, 38C.

Multiway, balconette, underwired and non-wired.

“Multi...way?”

“What?”

Snake started, the small, quiet voice closer than he expected. He dropped the tag in his hand and stepped back from the crowded, colorful rack to look at Sunny, standing beside him. 

Her little hands were clenched tightly at the bottom of her loose t-shirt, pulling it away from her body. The gesture reminded him of Otacon, who tended to pull at the ends of his sleeves when he was anxious, but Snake supposed this was due to more... _identifiable_ reasons.

In the last few months, Sunny had grown considerably, her longer legs and arms giving her the awkward, gangly look that gave Otacon chills when he thought about how fast she was getting older, and before the words he so desperately did not want to hear slipped from her mouth.

“Uncle Hal, I n-need a bra.”

The stutter that plagued her until she was nine made a spectacular appearance as she stood before Hal, gently tugging at the bottom of her shirt. She was eleven, now, and came up to his chest when she wasn't hunched over her latest project – which was currently a different version of the Mk. II, a more compact, waterproof one that had a quad-processor rather than the dual the the previous model ran on. Sunny was hoping she could get it to store a near-infinite amount of memory, as her main goal as to make it teachable. Get it to learn from what it saw and adapt to each situation. 

Otacon mimicked her stutter, a deep red blush of embarrassment creeping up his face. “Y-You need a, ahh,” he stammered, quickly glancing around for his backup, who seemed to have mysteriously disappeared from the room. “You need-” Otacon cut off to cough sharply, rubbing his now sweaty palms on the knees of his slacks. 

Their brightly-lit kitchen seemed a lot more confining than usual as his eyes flicked around, looking anywhere but the little girl before him. Sunny stared at him, her brows knitting together slowly as she watched him grow more uncomfortable. The platinum-blonde girl suddenly dropped her hands, anger snapping through her as she came to a realization. 

“Uncle Hal, I need a bra! You did this same thing when I st-started my period and it isn't fair!”

Otacon blinked at her explosion, confusion clouding his eyes as he rocked back on the wooden chair he sat in. “Sunny, what do you-”

“When I told you about that, you got weird and didn't want to t-take me to the store! And now you're acting weird again because,” she shook her head sharply, fists clenching with anger. “Because you don't want to hear about it! But I need it, so I'm the only one who gets to feel uncomfortable!”

The outburst prompted a flow of apologies from the bespectacled engineer, who immediately grabbed for his keys before remembering the conference he had set up with Mei-Ling about a proposal made to their business by a third party. He looked apologetically at Sunny, who turned and trotted upstairs where she found Snake preoccupying himself by fixing a shelf that had never had any problems. She stood with her arms crossed until he guiltily acknowledged her.

And thus they stood in the middle of a aisle together, each feeling as uncomfortable as the other. 

“What did you say?”

“Uh,” David muttered, “multiway. It's a type of...? I think.” He jammed his hands in his pockets, blue eyes staring fiercely at the floor. He glanced at Sunny, who looked on the verge of tears. She stood determinedly, a look of great concentration on her pale, round face as she took in leopard spots and neon stripes, her eyes searching for something more appropriate for an 11 year olds' first bra.

Snake's features softened and he pulled a hand out of his pocket to place it on Sunny's head, ruffling her hair gently. She turned to look up at him, her pale eyes watery, an uncharacteristic sadness reflected there.

“Hey,” he said, bending down, “hold on, don't do that.” He placed his hands on her tiny shoulders and smiled softly at her. “It's okay, Sunny. I'm just as lost about this as you are. But you know what?”

He paused, closely inspecting her face. Her pale but bright eyes, framed with long, light lashed that look identical to her late mothers', her pink cheeks darkened with embarrassment and frustration. A small tremor of unprecedented terror rattled through Snake, and forced himself to take a slow breath.

Sunny was slowly but surely getting older, and prettier, and more capable and more smart than either Snake or Otacon knew how to deal with. They'd both done their best, talked to Mei-Ling and even Meryl, researched and checked out books on how to parent young girls. They both understood how much of an effect not having a mother present had on Sunny, as it had took her nearly a day and a half filled with crying and coaxing from Otacon for her to tell them she had started menstruating.

“You can do this.”

The words startled Snake, who stared at the small smile Sunny gave him. “You can do this,” she repeated softly, patting his large hand with her own. 

Snake chuckled and used both hands to ruffle her hair, causing her to squeal and giggle and she swatted him away. She leaned against his side as he straightened, her laughter subsiding as she glanced forlornly at the rack once more. Snake looked around at the market, young teens laughing loudly by electronics, a mother with a crying baby looking through a clearance rack. 

When he turned back to Sunny, she was delicately looking through the bras, and her face had returned to the determined look from earlier. Snake joined her.

“What about this one?”

“A camo-colored bra? That's _so_ tacky!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks to my partner [finn](http://super-cycle.tumblr.com/) for the idea of camouflage-colored undergarments and awkward cute family moments


End file.
